Delays in Unemployment Benefits Causing Problems for Some Workers

outdated computer systems used by unemployment offices. Eli Rosenberg, work and labor reporter at the Washington Post, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Eli, Thanks so much for having me as we continue to make our way through the coronavirus pandemic. One lifeline that a lot of people have had has been unemployment benefits. Obviously, Congress past a bunch of things to help make that a little more robust.

People are getting an extra six hundred dollars for their payments, but there's a lot of other people who have just been kind of left in the lurch with all of this. There's been huge delay. People have gone by weeks and months without getting payments or even a callback sometimes from their local unemployment offices. It's been a pretty hard time for a lot of people. ELI tell us a little

bit about what's going on with unemployment. So many of us know by now that just flood of people out there have lost their work in the last couple of months because of pandemic, and that sent a ton of people applying for unemployment insurance from their state agencies. You have more than somewhere in the range of fifty million people apply for unemployment insurance at some point during this crisis,

and currently about eighteen million people continuing receiving benefits. So that flood of applicants has created a huge amount of challenges for these state agencies that are not used to that level of applications or really anything close to that, And for a lot of workers out there, this has been issue since the beginning of the pandemic. There's been some pretty significant delays that states have been slowly working

through and getting better at. But as we reported today, there's still some folks out there who've been waiting a month, two months or longer to get their unemployment better fits and struggling to just take care of their basic needs and bills in the meantime. Yeah, and unfortunately you know, we are reopening a lot of the states, but there's

surging cases, so that's a problem there. And then, as you noted in your article, there's tens of thousands of workers at Levi's, Wells Fargo, and United Airlines who learned that they could be getting furloughed or laid off in the coming months. So this whole thing is not over yet. With that respect, one thing I noted in your article. You mentioned that there's a lot of issues with fraud and user confusion over the new rules and filing processes.

This has helped bog down the whole process. What kind of fraud and user confusion are we looking at states around the country. I've been dealing with a level of fraud in terms of applications submitted for these unemployment claims. I think that's something that typically happens in general, and now with the flood of applicants, perhaps have been done

a slightly higher level than normal. So the normal work to kind of verify that applicants are who they say they are, that their personal information, their social security information hasn't been compromised. It is just so much harder because there's so many more of them out there. So that's just another issue which adds to the complicating factors of getting these applications through the system that you have to

verify that they're all legitimate. So we've heard some reports about people getting their claims flag for fraud even though they're legitimate claims. Is that assign of the system working legitimately just sort of normal speed bumps on the road to getting your insurance process, probably, but just with the level of applications we're seeing out there, it's something that makes a process even slower than it already is for some people. The backlog is pretty bad. One of the

stats you had in the article. By the end of May, about eighteen point eight million out of thirty three million claims just about had been paid out nationwide, So there's still a lot of people that were still waiting to get through the process. One question I had about that, do there's people that you know are waiting, let's say they're weeks or maybe even a month into the process. Do they get paid what they should have gotten paid from when they first applied, or do they just get

paid you know, the last two weeks. How does that work? We're hearing some different things. One thing that makes this kind of tricky to track is that the federal government at least doesn't track or released statistics about sort of how many claims of getting the country. But like you said, large number eighteen million out of about thirty three million had been processed, leaving more than twelve million claims that we're still needing processing at the end of May. So

for some folks those delays are pretty significant. What about denied claims? There was a section you had about Oklahoma having approved two thirty five thousand out of about five hundred and ninety thousand claims, but they had a big number three hundred and fifty thousand claims that they denied. How is that working out? We weren't able to get

the model of that for this story. The state of Oklahoma said that there's a new type of unemployment insurance available to self employed workers and gig workers, and to get that insurance, they have to first apply for regular unemployment insurance, get denied, and then apply for the second type of insurance that they're eligible for. So they were saying that a large number of those claims are due to people having to get denied to apply to the

PUA insurance. What it's called for gig workers, but only forty seven thousand people I think applied to the PUA in Oklahoma, so that's only about a seventh out of that three. So again, just trying to figure out what's happening with people out there, how long they're waiting, whether they're getting their benefits back, and just to kind of piggyback on the question you asked before, we've heard all

sorts of different things. We've heard some people waiting six weeks, eight weeks and then kindly getting on the lump sumb for some people waiting a long time and only getting the past couple of weeks. We're not getting all of the employment insurance if they work multiple jobs that they think they're owed, but also being so sort of frustrated with the system at that process that they're happy to

just be getting some money after not getting any. So it's not exactly clear whether or not people are getting paid out for all those benefits they missed. When they do get paid out, it's just such an unfortunate thing when so many people need the help. No one knew that the coronavirus pandemic was and it hit so hard, but we knew that this crush of job losses was going to hit. So that's kind of a tough thing to square away. And one thing that we always hear

about is just kind of the outdated systems. I know, the computers are a big thing. Oklahoma just going on with them. I think they said they have an old mainframe computer from night and they have like full time staff just dedicated to making sure that thing doesn't crap out. So, I mean, these are just all the difficulties that these unemployment officers are dealing with, as you mentioned too, while

they're just getting crushed with more and more claims. We sort of say that it's a confluence of crises right in the article, and one of those is the unprecedent ended volume claim. But one of those is the years of neglect and lack of funding and budgets being paired down in these state unemployment agencies. Pretty crazy right now, Did any office, state or private will be using a

mainframe computer from the ninth teen seventies. One thing that did make it into the story was we were talking to the agency and the state of Oregon that deals with unemployment insurance, and they too said that the computer they relied on was fifty years old, so I asked him if that menu it was from nineteen seventy. They didn't have an exact date, but apparently it might even

be even older than Oklahoma's main frame. So yeah, a system that's not been functioning well or set up to succeed now being really challenged in a way that it's not prepared for. Eli Rosenberg, work and labor reporter at the Washington Post, Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget after today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday.

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